Survey

Accelerating the energy transition

The “FlexBlue – Flexible cooling supply systems against the backdrop of increasing decarbonization” project was launched at the beginning of the year. Now the project partners – including the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT – are asking players in the refrigeration value chain for their support: with the help of a survey, they want to identify obstacles to the flexibilization of refrigeration supply systems.

The questionnaire can be found at https://s.fhg.de/5Mz5 and takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete. The data is analyzed anonymously so that no conclusions can be drawn about specific companies.
News-FlexBlue energy transition survey

© shutterstock/FZI/Composing Fraunhofer UMSICHT

The target groups include the manufacturing industry, trade and service providers, refrigeration users, refrigeration system and cold storage manufacturers, the energy industry and engineering and planning offices. “We need their practical experience in order to identify very specific hurdles in the implementation of flexibilized cooling supply systems and then develop application-oriented recommendations for overcoming them,” explains Dr. Annedore Mittreiter from Fraunhofer UMSICHT. “Ultimately, making refrigeration supply systems more flexible holds great potential for accelerating the energy transition: It can reduce CO2 emissions by 22 to 39 percent and electricity procurement costs by 35 to 54 percent.”

In addition to Fraunhofer UMSICHT, a whole range of stakeholders are behind “FlexBlue”:
The scientific consortium partners are the Institute for New Energy Systems at Ingolstadt University of Applied Sciences, the Institute for Automation and Applied Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the FZI Research Center for Information Technology. In addition, RÜTGERS GmbH & Co. KG as a system manufacturer, kraftBoxx GmbH as a specialist for PCM storage systems and SK Verbundenergie AG as the operator of a virtual storage power plant are working together as consortium partners to contribute their expertise. In addition, seven other organizations from the field support the project as associated partners. Together, they are developing target group-specific recommendations for the planning and operation of flexible cooling supply systems that contribute to decarbonization.

The know-how acquired along the way will be of direct benefit to players in the refrigeration sector – e.g. as part of a dedicated series of events entitled “FlexBlue.Connect”.

The first appointment is scheduled for September 17, 2024 from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. Annedore Mittreiter: “Knowledge transfer, activation and networking play an important role in our work:
We want to motivate and enable people to convert existing cooling supply systems or optimize the planning of new systems accordingly.”

Project partner:

kraftBoxx power to heat system, system integration of renewable energies with the kraftBoxx
News-FlexBlue energy transition survey